Use your free time to read articles and watch videos, sometimes about success stories and sometimes enough to learn something new about nutrition or training program. With daily knowledge your enthusiasm will grow, after which you won't be bothered with challenges and distractions. Also, make your own favorite music compilation that can keep you going. I love browsing motivational quotes and motivational posts on FB and Instagram.

Reward yourself when you complete a (or several) workout(s). I keep a list of rewards that I can give myself when I achieve certain milestones. Some of mine are big but they certainly don't have to be, they just need to be something you really want. Maybe it's an ice cream sundae. Maybe it's a new outfit. It doesn't matter what it is if you can keep your eyes on the prize. For individual workouts I cannot recommend music highly enough. Or maybe a podcast is your thing.

Do NOT talk down to yourself when you miss a workout. A sure way to kill your workouts is to talk negative to yourself about the times you didn't. Know that if you do 15 minutes of work you've done infinitely more than if you'd done nothing at all.

I lost 33 lbs. between January and the end of March this year, and I've kept it off.

These are the things that helped me motivate myself, and develop better habits around diet and fitness:

Eating:
1. Meal planning.I used a meal planning app (with a web interface) called Eat This Much, which costs about USD$70/year. The app has a lot of flexibility that allows you to tailor your meals to the amount of time you have to cook and rule out foods you can't eat (for example: if you have allergies, are keto, or vegetarian). You can also plan to cook meals for more than one person. For example, if you know you always eat dinner with your hubby, but you eat lunch by yourself at work, you can plan recipe sizes considering those parameters within the app.

2. Clearing my schedule.
Cooking all my meals myself was a departure from my previous routine, so I reduced the amount of commitments I had outside of work to make sure that I would be able to have some time to meal prep a few days a week.

3. Journaling.
Eating on calorie restriction or simply getting off of addictive foods like sugar and alcohol is really difficult mentally and emotionally. Taking the time to write out what I was experiencing helped me understand myself better and work on "re-programming" how I think about certain foods.

Gym:
1. Getting to bed early every night.
Again, I reduced the number of weekly social activities I would normally have in my calendar after work, so that I could be home in the evenings to meal prep, pack my gym bag with work clothes, and be in bed early enough to get a solid 8 hours of sleep before I had to be at the gym the next morning. Getting good rest not only helped with waking up early, but also helped to reduce my stress levels, cope with the mental & emotional side effects of calorie restriction and changing my eating habits, and helped my body recover from workouts.

2. Having a tasty pre-workout snack waiting for me in the morning.
Every week, I make a batch of Peanut Butter Protein Balls. They're about 100 calories each, which is just enough to give me some energy to work with at the gym, but not enough to make me feel full or like I need to throw up in the middle of my workout. Also, knowing that I have something tasty waiting for me helps me get out of bed, haha!

3. Noticing and affirming the good feelings I have when I'm working out.
If I'm doing cardio, I usually feel a little buzzed by the time it's over. When I'm lifting weights, I feel a rush after a hard set. After a few months of working out regularly, my body felt lighter, more stable, and more energetic. I noticed I was even a better dancer. Whenever I notice things like that, I spend a few minutes pondering it, so that I can remember that kind of thing when I'm having a hard time convincing myself to go to the gym. All the good body feels make it worth it in the end.

Generally:
1. Having a plan.
Knowing my workouts and meal plan for the week ahead and deciding to simply follow the plan makes fitness feasible for me, and reduces the day to day stress of making choices about what I can and can't eat or whether I'm going to work out today or if I should skip and try tomorrow. Consistency is key, and having a plan makes it easier.

2. Fitspo (controversial).
"Fitsporation" or "Fitspo" consists of images on the web that contain motivational pictures of people or words about fitness and diet. There's a whole community of people out there who use pictures of fitness models to keep themselves motivated to pursue diet and fitness changes. Personally, I disagree with the practice of body-shaming fat people and idolizing skinny people's bodies, so I'm not that interested in the fitness-model posts I see out there. But some of the inspirational quote images were helpful for getting into a good mindset, and I would occasionally browse Pinterest for stuff like that.

3. Devising a goal and reward system.
I gave myself non-food-related rewards for different milestones I would reach. For example, every 10 lbs lost (which would take 4 - 6 weeks) I purchased a 1-hour massage from a local spa, which was also great because my body was sore from working out.

Last edited by VirginiaPalacios; 08-21-2018 at 05:31 PM.
Reason: formatting